Dedicated Fonts for Mapping

[Midgardsormr]

The more common 'fused letters' (not used in modern english) like OE AE etc.

These are called ligatures. There are two ligatures common in English type: the double 't' and 'fl'.

I have to say, that making your own font from scratch is a tedious and time consuming process. I have a new found respect for font creators.

And now you know why the pros so jealously guard their right to get paid for that work.

Incidentally, a good type designer can make quite a lot of money, since there are relatively few people who actually do it properly.

[Ascension]

A lot of fonts come with "alternates" which usually include ligatures and/or swashes in those 4 basic styles (bold, italic, etc.). That way you don't have to try to cram all of that stuff into one font set. What you might think about adding are small caps (the first letter of a word is larger than the rest of the letters but all are capitalized), extended (letters are taller), wide (letters are wider), outline (empty letter with a stroke), shadowed (sort of like a drop shadow combined with an outside white stroke), decorative (letters have some sort of decoration in the fat parts like lines or paisleys or dots, etc), and then there's always the grunge/destroy/decay where the edges get roughed up. Fonts like Birmingham, Bolton, Helena, Lewisham, and Lightfoot are good examples as they are frequently all bundled together in one zip file. I only know of these 5 because I use them regularly and are mid to late 19th century.

What I'm wondering is if it would be more worthwhile to just make swash brushes to tack on top of a font (on a new layer for example) rather than making a whole font set. Ligatures would be tedious to do that way because you'd never get things kerned correctly (spacing between letters) but swashes and accents might be good.